Spare me these sickeningly hypocritical Met Gala celebrity cockroaches
Last week, I had a stomach bug that rendered me violently ill for many unedifying hours.
At the time, bent over a toilet bowl at 3 a.m., honking my guts up, I didn’t imagine anything could have a more sickening effect on me.
Wrong!
Last night’s Met Gala was infinitely more gut-wrenching.
This annual gathering in New York, where the world’s most privileged, pampered prima donnas indulge in an orgy of unctuous ostentatious extravagance, has grown increasingly nauseating in recent years as the rest of the planet fights killer viruses, war, and the worst cost-of-living crisis in memory.
But they excelled themselves with the 2023 theme: “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” And a dress code “in honor of Karl.”
The whole event was billed as a tribute to the late fashion king who was indisputably one of the all-time great designers.
And boy did they pay tribute!
Hollywood stars and supermodels flew in by private jets — taking time off from preaching about carbon footprint — from all over the world to wear Lagerfeld’s beautiful clothes, wax lyrical on the red carpet about his beautiful genius, and listen inside to heartfelt speeches about what an all-round beautiful guy he was.
Anyone stumbling into the Met by accident may have drawn the inevitable conclusion that the subject of all this obsequious fawning was some kind of hybrid non-binary fusion of Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela.
But if they did, they would be laboring under a massive misapprehension, because Karl Lagerfeld was… to put it mildly… what all these woke warriors would categorize as ‘problematic’.
In fact, he was one of the most ‘problematic’ people in fashion history; damned by his own words as a racist, sexist, fattist, homophobic, abuse-tolerating, feminist-hating embodiment of everything this A-list crowd professes to most loathe.
This was a guy who mocked #MeToo victims, ridiculed safety rules for protecting models on set, made Claudia Schiffer wear blackface in an afro wig, berated gay men who wanted to marry or adopt kids, called Adele ‘too fat’ and Heidi Klum ‘simply too heavy’, branded Princess Diana ‘stupid’, said Kate Middleton’s sister Pippa’s face was so unsightly she should only show her back, and claimed Coco Chanel couldn’t have been a feminist because ‘she was never ugly enough for that.’
But of course, none of this was mentioned last night.
Instead, the attending stars who are normally so quick to publicly signal their condemnatory virtue at such appalling attitudes and comments, competed with themselves as to who could blow the most sycophantic smoke up his bigoted, misogynist, backside.
For example, model Emily Ratajkowski has been very vocal about the #MeToo movement, predatory men, and the need to listen to women victims.
So why was she prancing down the red carpet in a Lagerfeld-style tribute gown when he once said about #MeToo: “What shocks me most in all of this are the starlets who have taken 20 years to remember what happened, not to mention the fact there are no prosecution witnesses.”
And then he scorned: “If you don’t want your pants pulled about, don’t become a model! Join a nunnery!”
And given her constant demands for all female body shapes to be respected, does Ms. Ratajkowski not care that he once scoffed: “No one wants to see curvy women. These are fat mummies sitting with their bags of crisps in front of the television, saying that thin models are ugly.”
Lagerfeld publicly blamed Kim Kardashian for suffering a violent assault and robbery in Paris in 2016, saying she deserved it for flaunting her wealth on Instagram.
Yet that didn’t stop her from also joining the tribute to the man who publicly shamed her.
Barbie star Margot Robbie wore an iconic Chanel gown originally worn by Cindy Crawford and said: “It’s an honor.”
Yet in 2016, she went on Saturday Night Live in a T-shirt promoting same-sex marriage that said “Say I Do, Down Under” with a map of Australia in rainbow colors.
That same year, Lagerfeld lashed out against gay marriage and gay couples adopting children.
Why would she feel such an ‘honor’ celebrating a man with those views?
The moment that best encapsulated the utter brazen hypocrisy of these tone-deaf celebrities came when someone arrived on the red carpet dressed as Lagerfeld’s beloved Birman cat, Choupette.
As the photographers went bonkers with excitement, the person inside the absurd outfit took the head off to reveal himself as Suicide Squad movie star Jared Leto.
He apparently wanted to pay his own special feline tribute to Lagerfeld’s pet, such was his deep admiration and respect for the man.
Yet what was this deep admiration and respect based on, exactly?
I seem to remember the same Jared Leto giving a powerful speech at the American Music Awards in 2015 when the Syrian conflict was driving millions of refugees out of the country, in which he said that “Syria matters” and added: “Many of us here are the sons and the daughters of immigrants… and Steve Jobs, (is) the son of a Syrian immigrant.”
But what was Karl Lagerfeld’s view of those same Syrian refugees?
In 2017, while appearing on a French television show, he evoked the Holocaust to attack then German chancellor Angela Merkel for taking in a million refugees including many from Syria.
“One cannot, even if there are decades between them, kill millions of Jews so you can bring millions of their worst enemies in their place,” he said. “I know someone in Germany who took a young Syrian and after four days, (he) said, ‘The greatest thing Germany invented was the Holocaust.'”
Again, why would Jared Leto want to honor a man with this shameful attitude to a cause he supposedly cares so much about?
Not all of outspoken Lagerfeld’s views were offensive.
As I noted when he died, he hated tattoos, sweatpants, meetings and sandals – all of which I detest too.
And there can be no doubting his incredible talent; he was a fashion legend for a reason.
But this wasn’t a tribute to his clothes, this was a tribute to the man, and the truth about Karl Lagerfeld is that was a nasty piece of work and if, say, Donald Trump had said half the things he did, the same people paying tribute to Lagerfeld would have been marching through the streets demanding he be cancelled.
Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who runs the Met Gala, said she hoped Lagerfeld “would understand how many people love and respect him” after this tribute.
I’m sure he would.
But I’m equally sure he’d be laughing his savagely intolerant little head off at all these two-faced celebrity wokesters turning a blind eye to his monstrously offensive side just because they want to wear his fabulous clothes and show off at one of the biggest media events of the year.
During the red carpet parade, a small cockroach suddenly appeared and slithered around for the cameras.
Famously, cockroaches can live for a week without their heads.
Their bodies still function without brains.
It was the perfect guest.
